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  STREET HEROES

  For my brothers - Steve, Sim and Jake

  Street Heroes copyright © Frances Lincoln Limited 2010

  Text copyright © Joe Layburn 2010

  Illustrations copyright © John Williams 2010

  The right of Joe Layburn to be identified as the author and John Williams to be identified as the illustrator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 (United Kingdom).

  First published in Great Britain and the USA in 2010 by

  Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 4 Torriano Mews,

  Torriano Avenue, London NW5 2RZ

  www.franceslincoln.com

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electrical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-84780-077-0

  Set in Bembo

  Printed in Croydon, Surrey, UK by CPI Bookmarque in February 2010

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  STREET HEROES

  JOE LAYBURN

  GEORGIE

  You know my dad. You’ve seen him on television, or on those massive posters, or even in the flesh. So you’ll understand why I could never be friends with someone who was black, or Asian, or different, in any way, from what I am - proper white British. That’s what I thought, until I started hearing voices.

  It was at one of Dad’s rallies. There was a big crowd. There always was when he went to places like Barking, where lots of white people live on run-down estates.

  Brian, one of Dad’s bodyguards, was getting twitchy, not so anyone else would have noticed, but I did. He was sweating, and he kept rubbing the back of his pockmarked neck. He had this thing stuck in his ear that meant he could hear what Tony and Mart were saying. The three of them, all built like heavyweight boxers, were not supposed to carry guns, but I imagined they did on days like this. They were always ready for trouble.

  Some people loved my Dad. I know for a fact that Brian, Tony and Mart would have taken a bullet for him if they’d had to. But many people loathed him. And that’s because, as the do-gooders claimed, my Dad ‘spread racial hatred’.

  When we first arrived at the Barking rally, a pale, skinny, blonde woman had leant in through the window of our car and shouted at Dad, “You’re a scumbag, Smith! My great-grandad died in the war trying to stop Nazis like you.” The press were there, their cameras clicking, so Dad just smiled back at her. “Nice to meet you too, darling.”

  Whenever he was about to speak to a crowd, Dad looked like a preacher. His eyes shone and he glowed with a kind of religious excitement. He was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt with an electric blue tie, and the cufflinks my sister Albion had given him for his birthday. They had this Union Jack design and he kept fidgeting with them, which told me he was nervous too. Dad didn’t have a speech written down. Once he started, words just seemed to fly from his mouth like birds released from a cage. He stepped towards the microphone at the front of the platform and stretched out his arms for the crowd to be silent. Then he turned back to me and winked. I grinned at him and gave him the thumbs up.

  “You all right?” he shouted, his voice hoarse and gravelly as always. It echoed round the town centre, bouncing off the shop windows and office buildings. “I said, are you all right?” This time the crowd called back that they were.

  He paused for a beat or two, then shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just heard.

  “Well, when I look around this place, I’m surprised you say that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy if you’re happy. But to my mind, the people of Barking, the real people of Barking, deserve better than this. You deserve better than to have the refugees and the asylum-seekers and the illegals taking what’s rightfully yours. If that’s not a problem for you, then I made a mistake coming here. But if that’s something that worries you like it worries me, well, then I’m glad I came to speak to you today. In your hearts, people of Barking, don’t you think you deserve a lot more than you’re getting? Cos I reckon you’re being cheated out of your birthright. Am I right, or what?”

  He cupped a hand to his right ear and this time they roared back at him like an incoming tide. I looked out at the white faces, raised arms waving little flags like you’d see on sandcastles at Southend or Clacton. And then the chanting started, like a rough sea beating against rocks: “Smiffy, Smiffy. . .” My dad, George Smith Senior glanced back again to where I was standing.

  “Hear that, Georgie boy? These are our people.”

  I started to smile but suddenly my head seemed to fill with a nuclear-size explosion, my body went rigid and the can of fizzy drink I’d been holding slipped through my fingers. It clattered down the side of the platform, but that noise was all but drowned out by what felt like wave upon wave of radio interference crashing around inside my skull. My mind was spinning wildly and when it finally stopped, someone else seemed to have grabbed control of it. A girl’s voice was speaking inside my head.

  My name is Fatima. I know that you can hear me. Please don’t be afraid.

  My vision had become distorted like a TV set on the blink, and I could feel myself swaying from side to side. Then Brian’s arm was around me, holding me up. Clearly he thought I was about to faint. I squinted hard and my dad’s anxious face swam slowly into view. I say anxious, but he looked annoyed too.

  “What’s the matter with you, Georgie?” he hissed.

  “I thought I heard this girl’s voice inside my head. She said her name was Fatima.”

  “Fatima?” he growled. “You’re having a laugh.”

  OMAR

  My brother Sadiq used to be a lot of fun. He’s six years older than me, but he never pushed me around or anything. He was always religious. I am too. But then he got really political, and that’s when things started to go wrong.

  Our father always said that we should let other people get on with their lives and trust they’d leave us to get on with ours. I suppose that made sense to me. But Sadiq would snap back at him: “What if they won’t leave us alone? What if they don’t approve of us? What then?”

  There was a group of young men at his university who distributed leaflets full of anger at the governments of Britain and America and the way they treat Muslims. One time the police tried to move them on when they were handing out their leaflets on Green Street, up from West Ham football ground. Sadiq got really mad. “What gives you the right to stop our free speech?” he asked the police officers who had pulled up in their van and piled out onto the street. “Shouldn’t you be down the road there, stopping the football hooligans from fighting each other?”

  “We’ve had some complaints about you, fella. You’re causing an obstruction and I can see your mouth is going to get you in bother.”

  I was with him that day but I knew there was little point trying to stop him back-chatting the policeman.

  “I don’t recognise your authority over me,” Sadiq muttered.

  The policeman heard him.

  “You’ll recognise my boot up your backside, if you don’t stop giving me lip, sunshine.”

  The other policemen laughed, which made Sadiq even more furious.

  “You’ll have to arrest me, because I’m not prepared to move from this spot,” he said.

  “Is that right?”

  “It’s not right that you’re persecuting me. That isn’t right a
t all.” Sadiq pulled at his beard nervously.

  “Please, Sadiq,” I said, grabbing a fistful of his white robe and trying to drag him away. “Let’s just go.”

  “Who’s this, then?” asked another of the policeman. He was from the North somewhere, with an accent that sounded like Bradford or Leeds.

  Sadiq just shook his head.

  “I’m his little brother,” I said. “We don’t want any trouble, officer.

  Sadiq glared at me as if I was cosying up to the enemy.

  “Seems to me that your kind are always looking for trouble,” the policeman said.

  “That’s not true,” I started to protest, but suddenly the voice of my sister Fatima was in my head, calm and soothing.

  Leave it be, Omar. If Sadiq wants to talk his way into Forest Gate police station, then let him. You need to come home.

  Fatima had always been able to do this: get inside my head, read my mind, share her thoughts with me, even when we were miles apart. It felt normal to me, but I knew I had to keep it a secret. A lot of people hate it if you’re different from them.

  MELISSA

  The first time I heard Fatima’s voice, I was alone, as usual, in the playground of Collinson Primary School. There was a group of girls in Year 6 and they decided who was in the in-crowd and who wasn’t. They seemed to change their minds every day, which kept those girls on the edge of the group almost sick with worry. For me, it never changed, though. The popular girls didn’t consider me at all.

  I’d been spending lunchtime with Mrs Stott, the new playground assistant, following her like a big dog around the rectangle of worn grass that ran alongside the netball courts.

  “Melissa, do you want to try sitting on the buddy bench? Then people will know that you’re looking to make friends.”

  I glanced at the bench. Next to it was a sign like you see at bus-stops that said, ‘Wait here for buddies!’

  “There’s no point. No one wants to play with me.”

  “It’d be worth a try, wouldn’t it?” She pulled back the sleeve of her red woollen coat and squinted at her watch. “Lunch break won’t be over for another twenty minutes or so.”

  “I’m all right on my own. I’ve got used to it.”

  Mrs Stott had almost white-blond hair with black roots that were showing through.

  “Are you going to keep your hair blonde or let it go back to its natural colour?” I asked her.

  Her mouth twitched into a half-smile.

  “That’s a funny sort of question, Melissa.”

  “I was just aksing, yeah. Trying to make conversation with you.”

  Mrs Stott laughed. “Fair enough, then. I’ve been meaning to do something with it. I just haven’t had the time.”

  “I think you should let it go black again. At the moment it looks a bit like you don’t care about your appearance. It’s a bit, you know, cheap.”

  Mrs Stott’s smile disappeared like a cloud had passed across her usually sunny face.

  “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

  “I’m just being honest. Innit people say that honesty is the best policy?”

  “Go and sit on the buddy bench, there’s a good girl.”

  I walked slowly past the bench and sat down under a leafless tree that grew next to the fence. Kele, this tall Nigerian kid, walked past bouncing a bright orange basketball. He made a clicking sound with his mouth.

  “What are you looking at?” I asked him.

  “Something fat and annoying,” he muttered.

  “I hate you, Kele,” I shouted after him. “I hate all of you!”

  That’s the exact moment when I got my first Fatima thunderbolt. After a while, it doesn’t hurt any more when she talks to you. But when you’re not used to it, it’s like a police siren going off inside your head. If I hadn’t been sitting down already, I swear I’d have fallen over.

  GEORGIE

  At school on Monday morning, people were huddled together in exclusive little groups, whispering and glancing in my direction. That made it just another day at Caddogan Hall. I’d never liked the place but I could see why it impressed people when they first saw it, my dad included. It was a rambling, grey building, with turrets everywhere, which loomed up dramatically out of the flat, boring Hertfordshire countryside. A high wall surrounded it – to keep out the peasants, according to my best and only mates Mark and Scooter. Like me, they were ‘day pupils’ who lived within driving distance, but a lot of kids boarded, which meant Caddogan Hall was basically their home.

  I would have felt sorry for the boarders if I’d liked any of them, but I kept away. Quite a few were foreign, from places like Hong Kong and Malaysia. I couldn’t see that we’d have much in common. The boys all seemed to like Maths and chess and stuff like that, things I was no good at. One of the Chinese ones who used the English name Fred and played on the rugby team had made an effort to be friendly. But he soon backed off when someone explained to him about my background. I didn’t care. Dad only wanted me to socialise with my “own kind”. That, he said, was the main reason he was prepared to pay for private education. Not that he’d been able to keep me away entirely from the “foreigners and ethnics” he spent his life moaning about.

  Mark and Scooter were late as usual, so I threw my rucksack down on the flagstones just inside the heavy iron front gates and pretended to be interested in the timetable on the back of my planner.

  You know that sixth sense you get when someone’s approaching you? I glanced up and, sure enough, one of the prefects was striding towards me with a smug smile creasing his pudding face.

  “Morning, Smith. I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I’m delighted to say you’re in a whole world of trouble. It’s only a matter of time till the school gets rid of you. Everyone knows you’re a racist and a thug, just like your father.”

  “My dad doesn’t have a problem paying the fees, and Caddogan Hall seems happy enough to take our money, so I reckon I’ll be staying for a while yet.”

  Dawkins, or Dawson, or whatever his name was, rocked back on his well-polished shoes and puffed himself up to his full height of about five foot three.

  “Seriously, aren’t you embarrassed having George Smith as your dad? He’s a common little man with some nasty ideas.”

  “So what exactly do you object to? His ideas, or the fact that he’s common?”

  He didn’t answer, so I picked up my rucksack of books and pushed past him. He called after me.

  “Erm, I have a message from Mr Atkinson. He wants to see you in his study at first break. It’s about you and Adam Rosen, in case you were wondering.”

  “I know what it’s about,” I said.

  Mr Atkinson’s study was like a well-furnished hobbit-hole. Light beams hardly dared to penetrate it, wood panelling of the darkest kind lined the walls, and there were shelves of dusty old books that appeared not to have been taken down and opened in my lifetime. The room smelled musty, which may have been due to the books, or to Mr Atkinson himself, who always wore a brown suit spattered with gravy and other unidentifiable substances from the Caddogan Hall kitchens. Wiry grey hair sprouted from his head, and out of his ears and nostrils. Pretty much everything about my housemaster’s appearance was off-putting, and yet Mr Atkinson was widely liked because he was felt to be fair. Scruffy and disorganised, but always fair.

  “Sit,” he said, when I entered. He motioned to an antique wooden chair, on which was placed a teetering pile of pale blue exercise books. I moved them onto the threadbare rug and sat down. The legs of the chair wobbled worryingly underneath me.

  Caddogan Hall was a no-smoking environment and the pipe that Mr Atkinson held clamped between his yellowed teeth was unlit. Still, the room smelled as though someone had recently been having a smoke. I waited. And waited. Finally, Mr Atkinson put down the fountain pen he’d been using to scratch out a lengthy letter and fixed me with his watery blue eyes.

  “It’s about A
dam Rosen,” he said.

  “I know, sir. The thing is, sir, Rosen hates me.”

  Mr Atkinson raised one of his bushy grey eyebrows.

  “He certainly hates what he thinks you stand for. What do you stand for, Smith?”

  Trust me, it wasn’t the first time I’d had a conversation like this at Caddogan Hall. Pretty much everyone assumed that my view of the world was the same as my dad’s.

  “I’m not sure what I stand for. If you mean, am I proud to be British, I suppose I am. My dad’s always telling me I should be. Do I have a problem with people who aren’t white, or with Jews like Rosen? I suppose I do, because they all seem to have a problem with me.”

  “So you’re a victim?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you feel it.”

  “Look, sir, I’m thirteen years old. I’m starting to feel like I don’t think the same way my dad does on every single issue, but everyone assumes I do, so I might as well.”

  “So, in time, you might be prepared to rub along with people of different backgrounds. You might even become friends with some of them.”

  I jutted my jaw out at Mr Atkinson.

  “I didn’t say that either. If they leave me alone, I’ll leave them alone.”

  Mr Atkinson sipped from a chipped enamel mug that had been perching precariously on top of an opened dictionary. He grimaced.

  “I’m always doing that,” he explained, “leaving hot drinks till they get too cold.”

  He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Then he remembered what we were there to talk about.

  “Rosen tells me he doesn’t want to make an issue of what happened, but I can’t ignore the fact that he’s sporting a rather impressive black eye.”

  “Did he accuse me of calling him names – you know, racist stuff?”

  “No, he didn’t. He actually admitted that he’d been badgering you, trying to get you to distance yourself from your father. I think he said he’d demanded that you ‘denounce’ your father, which is quite a word, and quite an idea, isn’t it?”